Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
In most data centers and many other large-scale computing systems, servers communicate with each other over one or more Internet Protocol networks and with mass storage over a storage-array network (SAN). When a new physical or virtual-machine server is deployed, storage must be allocated to it. This can be a time-consuming process, especially where the IP network and the SAN are managed by different people or groups. Often server deployment is delayed until a SAN administrator can attend to a request by the IP network administrator for mass storage to be allocated to servers.